Kyler Merber is Back on Track

As Kyle Merber runs down a dirt path cutting through the woods, a video camera follows. The crunch of gravel underfoot is a constant soundtrack. The day is bright. He jogs, faster than most people run, but he isn’t breathless. He talks to the camera manned by a video reporter from Flotrack about his goals for the next running season, his comeback year, the year after injuring his foot, the year after he feared his elite career was over before it began.

Merber is lean and lithe, with the obvious build of a serious runner. In the Flotrack video of Kyle running down the dirt path in Maine, his mop of black hair is tucked underneath a red and white patterned cap worn backwards. He wears black running shorts, a short-sleeved gray t-shirt and black just-above-the-ankle socks, a thin black choker necklace and a watch for keeping time. His recently pierced ears are adorned with little black stud earrings.

Since he was a little kid, Merber has been athletic. He played soccer and baseball, hockey and basketball. But his coaches were unanimous, his mother said: though Merber wasn’t that good, he was fast. “Kyle was always a very active kid, right from coming out of the womb practically,” Vicki Merber said. “He just never sat still. From a very young age, he knew he wanted to be a runner.”

In sixth grade, Merber began running competitively and training with local high school sprint coach, Charlie Bell, on Saturday mornings. Merber attributes his early explosive strength to the speed workouts his coach would have him run. “I would get pulled on by a bungee cord, and go twice as fast as a sixth grader ever should,” Merber says and then laughs. The bungee cord workouts forced him to turnover his legs faster, to fire faster, every step. But mainly, Merber remembers, it’s because coach Bell wanted to keep practice fun.

It was about the same time that Merber told his mother he wanted to become an Olympian. He started racing competitively late in elementary school, but his mother says, “I don’t remember him really winning or standing out. That didn’t really kick in until middle school.”

During his senior year of high school Merber, who’s from Long Island, set PRs and collected accolades for his running. His mile best in high school was 4:12. He ran a 1:53 800 and a 9:06 3200. When the big races approached in his senior year, Merber was mentally ready. He won states in cross country in the 5k, indoor and outdoor track in the mile and went on to win the mile at the Nike Indoor Nationals in Maryland, but it was the Milrose Games at Madison Square Garden where he had his biggest success. He qualified to race among the best-of-the-best in the country and finished first with a time of 4:13.87, less than a second ahead of the runner-up. It wasn’t a personal record, but he broke a mental barrier. Elite running seemed a possibility, collegiate running within his grasp.

Since then, Merber has steadily chipped away at his personal records. He races several distances: the 800, the 1500 and he’s “dabbled in the 5k”—but it’s the mile where he excels. And all these years later, he hasn’t lost sight of his Olympic goals. “2016,” Merber says. He just wants to be the best: “To not shoot for that is selling yourself short. You're never going to win a race if you don't think you can win the race."

In his freshman year at Columbia University, Merber didn’t just maintain his high school mile PR, he smashed it. In March of his first season with the team, he ran a 4:05, seven seconds faster than the year before. "A lot of people are worried about burning out in college and can you make this transition to this whole new level of running,” Merber said, but he eased easily into collegiate running. “I immediately felt at home at Columbia with the guys and the coaches. It made the transition really easy."

In March 2010, during his sophomore year on Columbia’s track, Merber broke the still-magical four minute mile, posting a 3:58.5. With that win, he says, Merber broke through a barrier. The NCAA championship record for the outdoor mile in track and field was set in 1973 by Dave Wottle. His time: 3:57.1. All of a sudden, the world of world-class elite running seemed possible to Merber. It was a matter now of persistent physical training, but more importantly, mental maturity. “I've never won a race I didn't think I would win,” Merber says. “I'm not going to step on the line thinking I'm going to come in third place and then end up winning. You have to mentally win the race before you can physically do it."

In August 2010, just a few days before heading to fall training camp at Columbia University, where he would study philosophy, Merber stepped on a shard of glass during a run that cut through his shoe and his skin and nicked the flexor tendon. Merber’s doctors said his recovery would only take a few weeks, but months later he still felt pain. The cross country and indoor seasons passed and Kyle still wasn’t ready.

Every morning during his recovery Merber awoke and thought, maybe this is the morning my foot won’t hurt. But his first step of the day was always disappointing. Eventually, Merber tried a procedure called platelet-rich plasma, the same regenerative treatment used by elite athletes like Alex Rodriguez and Kobe Bryant. Blood is extracted from the patient, spun in a centrifuge and the resulting plasma is reinjected into the wound site. Merber went through two rounds of treatment and had to keep his foot in a medical boot for six weeks after each, but by April of 2011, it had worked. When he planted his foot, the pain was gone.

Willy Wood, Director of Cross Country and Track and Field, who started at Columbia in 1994, remembers Merber before he came to school as, “one of the best recruits we’ve gotten.” But after his injury, Wood says that Merber “went from being potentially the most confident person on the planet to being unsure of himself.” For most of the fall 2012 cross country season, Merber was shaky; the injury lurked in the back of his mind.

Last summer, Merber got his running life back. He and a few running friends from schools around the country moved up to Maine, where they lived first in the basement of a friend’s house and then in a rented cottage on a nearby lake. Erik van Ingen, a friend Merber trained with that summer, remembers the worry in his friend’s voice when he talked about his future running. “He seemed a little distant,” van Ingen said, “there were those moments of weakness when you could tell he couldn't hide these sour feelings that he had.” But as the summer progressed, Merber’s mood changed. For nearly two months Merber ran 85 miles a week, with a long 15 to 18-mile run Sundays. Every day Merber got a little bit stronger, and he recalls fondly that it was the best summer of his life.

Merber continues down the dirt path in Maine, turning to talk to the reporter from Flotrack. He recalls the sadness he felt watching his teammates the previous year, while he sat out: “There were so many days when I was on the 10th floor of this building that I live in riding on a bike or an elliptical and I could just see my teammates running into Central Park, and I’m just thinking, like, they’re doing it without me. I need to get back out there.”

In the beginning of March 2012, Merber ran a 3:59.44 mile. He didn’t break his personal record, but for Merber, it was a milestone to run under four again. “In my mind I was back. I was fit enough to compete.” His parents were in the stands cheering on their son. And Merber’s thoughts are again on 2016 and the day he might become an Olympian.

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